A Vision Softly Creeping
by IzzyBells
Summary: post-TLJ. One student escaped Kylo Ren's massacre all those years ago, and she's been in hiding ever since. After the events of TLJ, she decides to step in. Her influence may prevent the destruction of the Rebellion. Technically Reylo, but this relies on Kylo/BenxOCF backstory. T for discussion/flashback of sexual situations and violence. Updates when I feel like it.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: Hi kids, happy new year! If you're following me as an author, you probably know I have a large multichap that I am in the middle of right now and honestly I'm trying rly hard to get a new chapter written but I'm having writers block for that story, sadly. Instead, this story won't leave me tf alone; I started it a couple years ago after TFA but after watching TLJ I trashed it all and rewrote it in a fit of gloriously misplaced inspiration.**

 **So listen I'm fully converted Reylo trash after TLJ, and that will hopefully make an appearance in here, I really want it to make an appearance in here, but I also like coming up with characters in general, so if you dislike Mary Sues (yes, I am mature enough to recognize my own Mary Sue characters) then I recommend you turn back now...I try pretty hard to keep my OCs away from Mary Sue territory but this is kinda shameless OFC fun.**

 *****TLJ SPOILERS AHEAD*****

"Ben."

He was dreaming of a battle gone wrong, himself in the center of a crowd of enemies, all angry and armed. Her voice was a startling calm in comparison to the seething people around him, and it carried over the roar of battlecries in the way voices sometimes do in dreams.

"Ben, it's me."

All the world around them was pale, pale white. Cold, barren, and unforgiving. Her figure was a warm red-orange beacon against the icy vastness, beyond the sea of colorless, faceless, merciless attackers. He looked up, scars cracking.

"You remember me."

"Of course," he choked. Crimson blood spattered the white ice under his crouched, hunched body, blown from his lips by the words. "How could I forget?"

She stood in bright contrast to the white expanse around them, a steady flare of life amidst certain death. Beatific, her eyes were nothing but the same golden warmth they always had been, her skin not creased by any expression beyond peace. She was just as he last saw her: young, vibrant, and so tangible it gripped his heart with sudden grief and regret.

"Look at yourself, Ben. You're so old now."

The gentle teasing tone brought back sunny memories of his adolescence, even in the midst of his current crisis. "And you're still so young," he answered, swallowing the blood filling his mouth. The metallic tang stuck to his teeth and the insides of his cheeks.

"But you remember me, Ben. You can't remember me older than this. You wouldn't recognize me. And I can barely recognize you."

Around him, the faceless, blank crowds were closing in, their anger deafening, blinding, burning, but he still heard her voice like a bell. They would crush him. He gasped for breath. "What do you mean?"

"You're so filled with hatred. Everything is anger and fear. You weren't all hate when I knew you, Ben. Don't you remember?"

For a moment, the primal, savage terror that had slowly been building in his chest receded. Like a tide, the enemies fell back. Warmth bloomed near his sternum, and he remembered. "Yes, I remember," he murmured. His tense limbs began to relax.

"Then why, Ben? Why are you doing this?"

He looked up again when her tone shifted to pained and desperate. The calm was gone, and her arms were tucked around her middle as if she were about to be sick. In her eyes raged a churning sea of yellow flame. Her brow had pinched up, and her gray lips were pulled wide in a grimace.

"Why, Ben?"

The hordes smothered him again, swallowing him in their wrath, and tore into him. He screamed as they ripped his body to shreds.

—

Aketaa came back to herself as if she'd been ejected out of a starfighter. Her consciousness slammed into her body, knocking her sideways into the wall of her little room. Her right lek got caught between the wood paneling and her shoulder, sending a pang all the way to the tip of her montral. She hadn't expected to startle him so much, but she hadn't expected his dreams to be so violent either. For a moment, she simply sat on the mattress and caught her breath. Had he woken up? she wondered. It was too dangerous to probe across the galaxy just then; he could be searching for her presence after the stunt she pulled.

This whole thing was risky. She did it because she cared, certainly, but at the same time, would she sacrifice her own safety for the chance that Kylo Ren might stumble away from the abyss of the Dark side? Her head told her she shouldn't. Her gut couldn't resist.

In the following weeks, Aketaa could sleep only an hour or two at a time, so anxious was she that her walls weren't good enough to protect her location. If Kylo could sense her at all, there was a risk, too high for comfort, that he and the First Order would descend upon this little village on this little planet, blasters blazing, and destroy her and everyone she had come to care about in the last years. She went about her daily work with the Raydonian village children, teaching them their lessons with a little less focus than usual, and the younglings picked up on it easily.

"Miss Anii, is somethin' botherin' you? D'you have enough food? My ma an' pa gets kinda worried when we have to eat less food, sometimes."

"Are you sick, Miss Anii? Mama stares into space like that sometimes when she gets sick-feelin'."

"If a grown-up's makin' you sad, you should tell 'im so's you don' gotta be sad, Miss Anii."

Aketaa smiled, corrected their grammar, and thanked them for their advice. It was a sweet gesture on their part, but it wasn't as helpful as they had intended. There was nothing she could do but wait until enough time passed for Kylo Ren to dismiss her contact as a simple dream. She told them she was feeling fine and had plenty to eat thanks to their parents, but a grown-up was making her very sad indeed, though it was impossible to tell him anything.

"I need to be patient," she told the children. "So long as I'm patient with him, things might turn out okay."

Two months and a few days went by before Aketaa even considered reaching out again. When she did, it took another couple of days to decide how she wanted to approach the next dream. She was fully capable of showing him a memory of their shared childhood, but she felt that would be too risky this soon. Another chance appearance would be all she could get away with. So one morning, she reached out a careful tendril of her consciousness to feel for him, gently poking around the galaxy until she found the First Order fleet, and then carefully brushing against every mind she found until she found his. He was awake. It seemed, though, that he would not be awake for long. Aketaa had no lessons with the children that day, so she decided to sit in her little room and wait until Kylo Ren fell asleep.

—

"Ben."

He was standing in a sun-bleached desert at the top of a sharp, steep cliff. She stepped up to the precipice next to him. In silence, they stood together. He barely even noticed she was there until she spoke.

"Ben, what's at the bottom of the cliff?"

"I don't know." The wind caught his voice and carried it away to the flat, washed-out horizon. He swallowed; in the dry air, it felt like a thin layer of dust had coated his throat. Maybe it had.

"How would we find out?"

He swallowed again. "Jump," he answered. "We could jump."

Silence fell around them again, oppressive and heavy like wool. The atmosphere was thick, and he licked his lips. They were dry and flaking. His mouth felt sandy. Somewhere in the distance, a wind rattled through some brush or branches, though nothing of the sort was anywhere in sight.

"If you stay behind, I'll jump, Ben. Then I'll climb back up and tell you what I find."

Before he even thought about it, his hand shot out to seize her arm. One of her bare feet was already over the edge, and she looked back up at him, questioning him with her golden eyes. Such innocent confusion was written across her young face that he almost smiled. "Don't," he breathed. Her back headtail smacked against his hand when she swung her head back forward. To his unexpected relief, she brought her foot back onto firm ground.

"Ben, do you remember when we met?"

His hand was still holding her arm. He looked down at his black leather glove against her colorful skin. His thumb pressed into her flesh just next to the end of one of the thick white lines that striped her shoulders. "Of course I remember," he whispered, tongue heavy. A little girl with orange skin and tiny headtails that only brushed the tops of her shoulders, shown into Luke's hut with her mother, a tall but hunched woman; her montrals would have poked through the roof if she hadn't bent over. He remembered. How could he forget?

"And do you remember when we parted?"

She turned her face up to his again, her warm eyes wide. His nose was clogged with dust. He had to part his parched lips to breathe, but it only brought in more of the pale desert dirt. Didn't she feel how this place would suffocate them both? Her front headtail fell against his wrist. He knew without feeling it that the skin would be warm and smooth against his.

"We hurt each other, Ben."

His lungs were burning, and he felt short of breath. He could hear how he was wheezing to take in air. Little puffs of dust blew past his lips with every exhalation.

"Ben, am I your prisoner? Your grip is tight."

He let go of her arm to drop to his knees, staring down off the edge of the cliff into a giant white dust cloud. He coughed, hacked, choked, and couldn't breathe. He felt her hand in his hair, gently and comforting, and he leaned into her touch between coughs without fully realizing it. Soon enough, his lungs stopped burning, and his mouth and throat and nose began to clear up. He sat back on his heels and dropped his head to her side, letting her form support the weight of his upper body.

"What happened, Ben?"

She stepped away. The ground suddenly felt very unstable.

"What happened?"

He plummeted off the edge of the cliff. The dust cloud met him long before he stopped falling, and he couldn't breathe long before he hit the ground again.

—

It pained Aketaa to watch Kylo Ren suffer in his dreams. She could do something, change their outcomes, ease his soul at least in his sleep. But she knew she shouldn't, and in this case Aketaa decided she should listen to her head.

That afternoon she ate a lunch of flatbread and the fleshy pink Raydonian fruit the people here began domesticating only a couple decades ago, and she thought over her meal. The words of Master Skywalker's Force ghost echoed in her mind: "You've done well to hide yourself, even from me, but it's time to stretch those feelers out again like I know you can. Find Ben. Try to sway his mind away from the Dark side as my student Rey must focus her energies on my sister's war. I don't mean for you to bring him to the Light—that may not be possible—but maybe it's time to let the old ways die. Find a balance, Aketaa. Begin again, stronger. The Force will be with you...trust it always."

He had placed a large, twofold burden on her shoulders. Bring Kylo Ren back from the Dark, and find a balance. A balance, he'd said. A balance. A balance of what? Old and new ways? Had Master Skywalker left it to her to decide which practices to keep and discard? It seemed like too much responsibility, especially when she hadn't fully completed her training.

No, he told her to start over anew. Throw out the old Jedi teachings and return to the beginning. On primitive planets, whole tribes of Force-sensitive peoples lived isolated from both the Jedi and the Sith; what did they believe? How did they relate themselves to the Force?

The Togruta naturally have a certain affinity with the Force; traditionally her people walked barefoot to feel their connection with the land. With or without the Jedi, the Force is there, always, a constant energy between every living and nonliving thing in the universe. The Jedi used it to keep the peace and the Sith used it to gain power, and both kept to the extremes of the Light and the Dark. Maybe Master Skywalker intended for her to find a balance between Light and Dark, accepting both and abhorring neither. Life isn't black and white, so why should relation to the Force be black and white? Everything is a shade of gray, is it not?

Aketaa stood to wash her dishes. As she shuffled over the stone-paved floor of her room in the moccasins everyone in the village wore, one detail from Kylo Ren's dream came to mind. She appeared as he remembered her from years, almost a decade, ago; when she stepped off the cliff, he hadn't pictured her in shoes. Did she go barefoot habitually as a child? Aketaa couldn't remember. Standing at the water pump in her room's kitchenette, she kicked off her shoes. The damp stone was cool under her feet.

—

"Ben."

This was an inopportune time for her to make an appearance. The woman beneath him didn't seem to notice.

"Ben, this is just indecent."

He knew that. Of course he knew that. It would be very much appreciated if she just went away.

"You can't just wave me away like any other figment of your imagination."

He sighed. This could've been a pleasant dream, but it just had to turn sour, didn't it? He didn't mind seeing her usually, but if he started associating her image with this corner of his psyche he might have to track her down and murder her. Unless, of course, she had died sometime in the past years of his life. In that case, she must be haunting him.

"We have to talk, Ben."

Bet. The woman writhed and gave a little helpless moan. "Kylo," she whimpered. He grit his teeth.

"I'm not enjoying this either, but we have to talk."

"What about?" he hissed.

"You. Me. The universe." Her young form made this all the worse, and the effect of her vague statements spoken in a child's voice sent an extremely unwelcome shiver down his spine.

No. She was in his head, just an old memory. "Enough," he growled, and forced her out of his dream.

—

A bad headache lingered behind her brow through the next day, and Aketaa vowed to pay more careful attention to his mood before entering his mind the next time. It wasn't that what she saw left her with the taste of bile in her mouth, even though it did; being personally thrown out apparently had side effects. Before when she'd been booted out of Kylo's head, it was because his dream was over and she was ejected like a guest whose allotted time was up. This time, he had mentally manhandled her out himself.

The harvest season had arrived in this sector of Raydonia, so all of Aketaa's students were working with their parents until winter. She excused them after she made them promise to practice their reading on their own, so long as their other chores were done first. As much as Aketaa believed education was important, she wouldn't come between her students and their families; she had no right to tell them to put off their work for her. Without lessons with the children to occupy her and not much else to do, she had a ridiculous amount of time to sit and think.

Every way she looked at it, no matter how she tried to reason around it, Aketaa could not come to any conclusion besides the fact that the Force is a truly neutral entity. How else could truly neutral organisms be connected to it? Living grass is neither Light nor Dark, Aketaa reasoned, it just exists. It is in the Force, and one can manipulate it as such, but it has no polarized aura to it. Therefore, the Force must be neutral, and the Light and Dark sides that practically the whole galaxy attribute to the Force itself must come from outward factors.

How, then, can one clearly sense a difference between what are called the Light and the Dark sides of the Force? How, then, are some fully drenched in the Light and some fully drowned in the Dark? This was something Aketaa could make neither head nor tail of. At the moment, her working theory was that people themselves polarized the Force.

A firm knock on her door shook Aketaa out of her musings. Her bare feet made a soft slapping noise over the stone floor as she crossed her room to answer it. She sensed no danger; she had not sensed danger from any of these colonists since she first arrived and they were still suspicious of her. She did, however, sense a signature flutter of nerves that she knew well.

When Aketaa first arrived on Raydonia almost six years ago, she offered her services as a teacher of reading, writing, and mathematics in return for food and a place to stay. They let her have a one-room suite, part of a unit designed as an inn for travelers, and the village families took turns hosting her for lunches and dinners until she had learned how to cook a few common local meals. Her class at first ranged wildly in age from six to twenty-seven, and Aketaa found it intimidating to instruct people years older than she was on how to read and write Basic. Eventually, though, once her older students had learned all they had time to learn or all they had need of learning, her class dwindled down to just children. One older boy, a then-seventeen-year-old named Dom, stuck with the youngsters for a long time after everyone else his age had left. His family had hosted Aketaa often, and still extended her an invitation from time to time, so she was familiar enough with him to notice a shift in his demeanor. It was all too clear to her that the boy had developed a bad crush, and even six years later Aketaa still sensed his feelings for her as strong as ever, if not stronger.

"Dom, good afternoon," she greeted. She could see his pulse pounding in his throat, poor boy. "What brings you here?"

"My mother's makin' a stew to celebrate our first field harvested," he answered. "If you'd like to come for dinner, we'd be happy to have you this evenin'." His anxiety spiked suddenly as he appeared to take a deep breath in preparation to say something else. "And I was wonderin', if you haven't had lunch yet, if you'd like to eat with me? I finished another book, and I thought we could talk about it."

Dom was nothing if not sweet. He was always polite and got along well with the children in the village, and Aketaa wished he would spend less time pursuing her and more time with the young women his age who would be lucky to have him. In any case, she did enjoy the company of his family and she liked their book discussions. "I already ate, but you're welcome to come in. We can talk about the book over tea." Aketaa opened the door wider to let him in before leaving him to cross the threshold himself so she could put a kettle of water on the electric burner in the kitchenette. "I'll come for stew, too. Anything your mother makes is always delicious."

She heard him pull out one of her two chairs and have a seat, setting something on her table, probably his datapad. "What happened to your shoes?" he asked.

"Hm?"

"You're in bare feet, I mean. Did something happen to your shoes?"

For a moment, Aketaa had forgotten her lack of shoes. Going barefoot at least in her own room had become quite natural to her. "I don't wear shoes at home," she answered. She paused, sensing his confusion but unsure of how to explain herself without mentioning the Force. No one here knew of her past or her gifts; that was a secret she had guarded close to her chest since Tatooine. "Growing up, I never wore shoes. My kind believes going barefoot keeps us more connected to the planet." Vagueness never fails, especially when mixed with half-truths. Dom accepted this, and turned the conversation to his book.

Aketaa brought tea to the table with a quiet smile. As usual, his nerves calmed the longer he spent in her presence, even without a gentle soothing Force suggestion on her part. They discussed the themes and allegories of his book for a good amount of time before she interrupted to ask what time she should arrive at his family's house for dinner, and then he said he should get back home to help his father. Dom thanked her for the tea and conversation before he left Aketaa alone with her thoughts once more.

She truly felt bad for the boy. Well, she mused, he wasn't really a boy anymore, was he? Dom had just celebrated his twenty-second birthday recently; Aketaa supposed he qualified as a young man and had for a couple years now. Soon enough people would start wondering why he wasn't interested in courting the very available young women his age. Aketaa herself often wondered why he didn't just give up. Surely he realized she couldn't give him what he wanted? His intentions were pure, but Aketaa almost preferred that they weren't. Attachments were forbidden—…

Why, though? Forbiddance of personal attachment was one of the main conditions of the Jedi. They made one weak and susceptible to bribery and blackmail and selfishness. How could a Jedi be expected to choose duty over family or a lover if asked? Strong love corrupts and controls, just like hatred and pride and greed. This is why the Jedi left their families, had no husbands or wives or children, and kept friendships as impersonal as possible. Just like staunch adherence to the Light, this was another old Jedi custom, and hadn't Master Skywalker told her to start anew?

Was there an advantage to attachment that the Jedi overlooked? That was a question Aketaa had dealt with before when she was still a student of Master Skywalker's academy. Perhaps if one aimed to uphold galactic peace, attachment might get in the way of prioritizing the greater good, and it could distract from peacekeeping and studying the Force and whatever else the Jedi used to do. But couldn't attachment supply motivation? It could be a distraction and a weakness, maybe, but it could give one something to fight for, something to protect, something more tangible than abstract galactic peace. And anyway, maintaining galactic peace would be contradictory to balance, but that was a question for another time.

Regardless of whether or not attachment could be good, Aketaa still felt she couldn't give what Dom wanted. He hoped to love her, provide for her, start a family with her, and grow old with her. He wanted a long, happy life with her, and Aketaa couldn't commit to that. First of all, she simply didn't see him in that way after being his teacher for the majority of her time here. Second, she felt wary of planning anything longterm on this planet; any day she might be discovered, especially with her new forays into Kylo Ren's dreams. Third, children were extremely questionable at best biologically, considering she and Dom were two quite different species, and she had never heard of Togruta-human hybrids. Aketaa truly hoped that she wasn't giving Dom false hope with their friendly interactions, but it would never work.

That evening, just before the sun set, she walked across the village to join her kind hosts for stew. Dinner with Dom's family was delicious, of course, but Aketaa didn't stay for too long. The nervous flutters only increased, never decreased like usual, and because of that she felt uneasy the entire time she was there.

—

"Ben, wait for me!"

He stood in a brilliant emerald forest illuminated by sunshine. Birds twittered high above, and leaves rustled with a summer breeze he couldn't feel. Patches of blue sky peeked through the canopy of green overhead. It felt as if he'd been there before. He watched a white butterfly bob a path across the undergrowth, trying to place that feeling of familiarity, but then he caught sight of a blur of red-orange and white and navy barreling towards him. Alarmed, he tried to sidestep the runner but wasn't fast enough—only for her to pass right through him as if he were made of mist.

"Wait up!"

This time, he realized as he turned, she was much younger than she had appeared in previous dreams, only about ten years old. Her front headtails were barely long enough to bounce against her collarbones as she sprinted after who he assumed to be a younger version of himself. From behind, he recognized the tan robes of the Jedi students.

She stopped quickly, skidding on the dirt. "Where'd you go?" she asked, young voice sounding so innocent and confused that he felt his heart clench.

Movement caught his eye, and his attention was drawn towards a tall boy with a dark mop of hair creeping out from behind a tree as the young Togruta turned slowly in a circle, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. He recognized himself as a child, somewhere during his eleventh year judging by the length of his hair; just before his twelfth birthday his uncle had made him cut it. That made her nine. As he watched his younger self creep up on his friend, it dawned on him that they must've been playing a game to practice using Force shields. Often in their spare time they would play games such as this one to strengthen their abilities, he remembered.

"Gotcha!" young Ben shouted, grabbing her around her body, trapping both of her arms to her sides. He leaned back, lifting her feet off the ground and she yelped, startled, and kicked her legs in the air.

This was a memory. He remembered this.

Her wild legs and squirming body were too much for his eleven-year-old frame, and he overcorrected. He watched the two children, able to pinpoint exactly when they both realized death was nigh by their synchronized looks of sudden dread. They fell backwards. They both screamed. Standing there as a fully mature adult, he winced at the high pitch of his childhood scream, and considering the fact that he clearly screamed higher than she did, he thought his wince was justified. Young Ben's head smacked against the tree behind them, and it was off-center of the trunk enough to change their trajectory, falling sideways now on one side of the tree. She rolled away and onto her knees as soon as they hit the ground, while he rolled onto his front and groaned.

"Stars, are you okay?" she cried, walking on her knees towards his head. She sat back on her heels and looked through his hair at the back of his head. Young Ben went very still as her fingers combed through his hair, parting it in different spots. "It doesn't look like you're bleeding," she mused. "I guess your stupid hair saved you."

This couldn't be his own memory, could it? There was no way he could've remembered all the faces she made, both while they were still playing and now as she moved his hair to look at the back of his neck. And surely if it were his own memory he would be watching it from his point of view, or at least with himself as the focus; instead she seemed to be the main character as the events unfolded. If it were his own memory, surely his emotions at the time would've been more apparent than simply laying still. Could this be not his memory, but her memory of the same event? Could she be reaching out to him?

She hesitated and bit her gray lower lip for a brief moment, betraying nervousness he never sensed, before ducking her head quickly to plant a kiss on the back of young Ben's head. "I think you're okay," she announced.

He smiled, even as the memory began to dissolve around him. Later, he would vomit on her as they made their way back to his—back to Skywalker. He got a concussion and a crush that day, and even after all these years he realized he couldn't regret either.

His last thought before everything faded to the darkness of deeper sleep was that if he truly just witnessed her memory, it must have been projected from somewhere.

—

Far across the galaxy from Kylo Ren, Aketaa returned to herself in a panic. Showing him her memory was a mistake. She had thought it would be innocuous enough: a small, shared event that was so long ago that he likely wouldn't notice any odd details that might identify the scene as one from her mind and not his. It was far too overconfident a move. Now because of her slip, Kylo Ren was suspicious. Aketaa doubted that he would wave the whole thing away as just another dream of his own.

In her head, she began to formulate a list of everything she would need to pack, which wasn't much, and everyone she would need to tell of her departure. What explanation could she give? "I know I've been teaching your sons and daughters for the past six years, but I'm actually a fugitive Force-sensitive in hiding from Commander Kylo Ren of the First Order, only recently my old Jedi Master died and left it to me to find a new way of relating to the Force and to turn Kylo Ren away from the Dark side if necessary and possible. I've been visiting his dreams for months now and because of that I have endangered this entire planet with my presence, so I plan to leave as soon as possible." No, that would be ridiculous. No one would believe her, and if they did, she refused to give them any cause to worry or rally for her sake.

She had just begun to stack her clothes on the table when she felt Dom's presence outside her door. He knocked a moment later. Aketaa sighed but called for him to come in anyway.

"Good mornin'. W-what are you doin'?" His usual nerves became true worry as he surveyed the datapads and folded clothes and shoes and even her lightsaber on the table—her lightsaber, kriff, her lightsaber. "Are you goin' somewhere?" he asked slowly, watching her dig under the bed for the collapsible crate she had originally brought her things in all those years ago.

She chose not to answer, instead crouching on the floor to pop the crate into its full shape. Most of her concentration was dedicated to reigning in the boiling terror in her mind and locking her entire being under the strongest, thickest shields she could muster. Only a small corner of her attention monitored Dom and his emotions as he stepped up to her table, his hurt confusion and blooming awe. Surely he recognized what the robes she never wore but saved meant, what the metal hilt she never used but kept meant...but it didn't matter now, not when she had to leave before the First Order tracked her down and came searching for her.

"Is that—are these yours?" he asked, voice hushed. Metal scraped against the wooden table. "Is this a—a lightsaber?"

Dom's whispered reverence might've embarrassed and humbled Aketaa in any other situation, but her life was about to crumble around her and he was realizing that someone he had known half a decade had lied to his entire village the whole time. She stood to transfer what few things she truly owned into the crate, gaze resolutely focused on her hands. A touch on her shoulder, brushing her damaged front lek, froze her. Aketaa bit her lip, hands shaking, and looked up.

"You're cryin'," was all he said.

She hadn't even realized. When she lifted a hand to her cheek, it was wet with tears; she wiped them away with a rough brush of her fingers.

Dom hesitated before setting the lightsaber hilt back down on the table and gently guiding her to sit in a chair. For a moment, he seemed caught between kneeling before her and pulling the other chair over. He settled in the middle and did neither, standing over her rather unhelpfully. He offered her a handkerchief to wipe her tears with, and he waited until she had taken a few calming breaths to collect herself before launching into all of his questions.

"Are you a Jedi? I thought the Jedi were extinct? Why did you hide it? Why did you come here in the first place? Why do you have to go? Did we do somethin' to upset you? Is it the Resistance?"

He would've continued forever if Aketaa hadn't flicked her eyes up to him, piercing him with a glare more fierce than she had given in a long time. With an audible click of his teeth, Dom shut his mouth, but he still looked at her expectantly. Aketaa took another round of deep breaths, willing some of the calm she could always find in meditation to wash over her now.

"The saber is mine, yes," she began, voice rough, "but I'm not a Jedi. I was almost a Jedi, once, long ago, but there was—there was an incident, and now the Jedi are truly gone. I barely escaped, and I was only a student. I fled, and I hid first on Tatooine, then on Akiva, trying to bury my presence as deep as I could, but I didn't feel safe enough until I came here. I thought this was remote enough that I would never be found, especially if I kept every part of my Force sensitivity a secret. It worked, I think. That is, it did until my old master found me and contacted me and told me to reach out again, and so I did," she continued, feeling the panic mounting in her stomach and rising to her chest again, "and it was okay until I tried too much too soon and now he knows I'm the one reaching out and he'll find me and I have to leave before he can find me and follow me here and destroy the entire planet trying to destroy me."

She was crying again, and shaking, and now Dom did kneel before her chair to rub his hands over her arms. "It's okay, don't worry," he said, trying to soothe, but his growing fear washed over Aketaa like a rising flood. "We can tell the mayor, and he can contact the other villages to put them on alert—"

"No!" she yelped, catching his elbow. "The fewer people who know, the better. I shouldn't have even told you; you're in danger now too."

"Don't worry about me, I'm sure everyone would want to help you too."

"No one else can know," she said, tone firm, and stood to resume packing her things.

"Aketaa, please—"

"No, Dom! Your knowing puts the planet in enough danger as it is."

"Then if you're escapin', let me come with you! We'll—we'll hide together."

Aketaa froze in the middle of insulating a data pad between the folds of her packed clothes. There was no way she could leave him here, knowing as much of her story as he did, and there was no way she could take him. He was a liability in both cases. Another option, a third option, came to Aketaa like a lightning bolt. She didn't like it, but she knew it was the only way to protect the village and protect herself.

Trust the Force, Master Skywalker had said. Trust the Force.

Swallowing a lump in her throat, Aketaa turned to Dom. The hope and trust in his eyes and radiating from him made her falter, but she had to do this. There was no way around it. She lifted her hand.

"You will forget all you have heard and seen today in this room," she commanded.

He blinked once, twice, before his face smoothed into a peaceful daze. "I will forget all I have heard and seen today in this room," he repeated.

She took another deep breath. "You will sleep now," she added.

"I will—"

His eyes were shut and his body was falling before he even finished the sentence. Aketaa rushed the catch his limp form, hefting him in her arms with some difficulty. She deposited him on the bed and hurried to finish her preparations to leave. Her last action before sealing the crate was to fill the extra space with her stockpiled credits; they would have to support her until she could get somewhere safe—or at least safer—and find some means to an income. Just before she left, she brushed Dom's mind with the Force, rousing him gently.

"W-what happened?" he groaned, sitting up.

"You passed out all of a sudden in the middle of our conversation," she answered, careful to hide any outward signs of turmoil.

Dom raised a hand to his head. "What conversation?"

"I was telling you about my aunt on Shili, don't you remember?"

He eyed her packed crate and traveling coat. "Is that where you're goin'?"

"I told you it was. Are you alright?"

He was quiet a moment, his brow creased in confusion. "I'm...yeah, I'm okay, I think."

"Okay. I need to wrap things up with the innkeeper about my ship, or otherwise I'd stay. You should head home and rest. It must be the harvest work tiring you out," she said, using just a little Force suggestion so that he'd comply and go straight home.

It pained her to leave the way she needed to. The innkeeper had always been kind to her, letting her occupy her room and stowing her ship on the condition that she teach his young daughters, no monetary payment necessary. Now she approached with credits in hand, prepared to ask that he fill her ship's fuel reserves completely, but he only smiled and told her to keep her money. At his question, Aketaa gave him the same story she had just given Dom: she needed to visit her aunt on Shili, her homeworld, and it was an emergency. The innkeeper promised to let the village know her reasons for taking off so quickly and wished her and her fictitious aunt well as Aketaa boarded her ship, crate in her arms.

"I don't know how long I'll be gone or if I can return," she said, thankful that this was the only goodbye she would need to make. Her throat felt thick with emotion.

The innkeeper smiled his gentle smile. "I'll have a room open for you if you do," he said with a wink.

She watched him wave her off as she rose through the air until she couldn't see him anymore. With a deep, stabilizing breath, she reminded herself that she was leaving to protect them, and pushed her ship faster to break atmo. The sooner she entered hyperspace, the better—but where could she go?

Before, when she was scared and alone and had nowhere to go, Aketaa had gone to Tatooine. Mos Eisley, she had heard long, long ago, was a slimy pit of scum from all over the galaxy, bounty hunters and gangsters and fugitives alike. It was both a fantastic and terrible place to hide. If a warrant was out for your head, a city full of bounty hunters was the absolute last place you should go. If all you wanted was to maintain your anonymity, it was such a big and diverse city that nothing was out of place and very few things were suspicious. It had been as good a place as any for Aketaa to get her bearings on her own and look into long-term hiding solutions. She had managed it once; she could manage it again.

With her mind made up, Aketaa powered up the hyperdrive as she punched in the coordinates for Tatooine. At a safe distance from Raydonia, she made the jump into hyperspace and then collapsed back into the pilot's seat, exhausted. Now she could rest—above all, she could relax.

Hours later, after a long meditation, where instead of grounding herself to the universe around her, she turned inward to unravel the knot of fear and worry in her gut, the ship came out of hyperspace with Tatooine in sight. There didn't appear to be any sort of blockade around the planet, and Aketaa sensed no obvious dangerous presence. She piloted the ship into the planet's orbit, content to float for a moment while she steadied herself and locked down her mental shield even tighter. It was another few minutes before she would be close enough to Mos Eisley for her to feel comfortable entering atmo.

When she finally approached the city, heading for the passenger ship docks, Aketaa probed around the city, feeling people of all sorts, dangerous, nasty, untrustworthy, and wary people, but none who posed any danger specifically to her. She labeled herself as a traveler just passing through and paid to store her ship for this day and the next. Early mornings in Mos Eisley were quiet; the drunks already staggered home and the vendors were just preparing to open their stalls for the day, and Aketaa could move relatively safely through the dirty streets. Before the day was out, she hoped to have some idea of where to go next.

—

Rasping breath echoed in his ears, too loud, interrupting his meditation. There was a phantom pain on the right side of his head, near his ear, and his right shoulder burned as if he had been shot. Over the breathing, the sound of an entrance ramp lowering—all he could see was the red glow of light behind closed eyelids. People chattering, large animals and speeders and carts moving, all of it was loud, louder than he was used to, and too echoey, as if he were listening through pipes. Someone with a gruff voice asked if he was alright, and his eyes were still closed, but he felt his head give a sharp nod, and then finally he could see.

Everything was a shade of orange-tan, as if the whole structure he stood in was build out of sand. He handed credits to someone in his peripheral vision before staggering down the ramp. There was an odd extra weight around his head, and it moved as he did, swinging to follow his head—the weight on his right side felt unbalanced, and that phantom pain was enough to make him want to crumple to the ground, but his body walked on. He became aware that his center of gravity was wrong and his point of view looked too short to be correct. This was someone else's body, and he was merely looking through its eyes.

The world seemed to blur, and then he was in a bar, still that awful sand color. The teal-skinned Twi'lek barmaid mentioned bacta and rest before he felt an odd touch to that phantom weight around his head that sent a shiver down his spine before the body went very still.

"What's a pretty little exotic thing like you doing here?" came the slimy voice of some sleazy figure behind him.

Before he even comprehended what the man had said, the body he was stuck in jumped up and whirled around to grab the sleemo and pin him against the bar with his arm twisted behind his back. He thought he actually heard himself hiss as he pressed the man into the edge of the bar. This body's arms were red-orange.

"Kriff, alright, get off, I'm sorry!" the man coughed. After he was released, he limped away with a mean but defeated look, and the body sat back on what he assumed was a bar stool. The Twi'lek only had one tattooed eyebrow raised to indicate any reaction, as if she was annoyed their conversation had been interrupted, nothing more.

Everything went blurry and cleared again when he was somehow in a darkened—but still sandy—room with the Twi'lek. The pain of before had become just the dull, aching itch of a bacta-treated wound on both his head and his shoulder, but that was less interesting than the fact that he was staring right into the Twi'lek's sultry violet eyes, wishing he could tell who it was reflected back to him. His only warning was the Twi'lek's parting lips before she pounced, kissing the body he was still trapped in. He was glad the eyes slid shut again; this felt like a distinctly private moment that he perhaps should not see, even if he wanted to. Shut eyes did nothing to lessen the sensations the body was experiencing, however, and he felt almost disappointed when the backs of the eyelids blurred and all feeling faded away.

From the rest of the snippets of what he was certain were memories projected by accident, he gathered that whoever owned the eyes he looked through lived in that sandy horror city for an extended amount of time, living with that teal Twi'lek and maintaining a sexual relationship with her. The body worked behind the bar and worked between the sheets, selling itself to bar patrons who were only too willing to pay. Some encounters were good, and some encounters were not, but the resulting credits were carefully counted and saved, though he couldn't figure out what for.

The body stiffened when a squadron of off-duty Stormtroopers walked into the bar. He only saw flashes here and there—the body was too nervous or afraid to remember everything that happened—but somehow the encounter ended with a blaster in his face and a jade lightsaber held in a defensive block in a red-orange grip.

All senses cut out completely, leaving him in a black void. What he had just seen was unmistakable. He remembered that lightsaber, knew its owner, was all too familiar with the owner's red-orange skin. And he was all too familiar with her injury.

"Why did you show me this?" he called out. He could feel mortification blossoming around him, but she was nowhere to be seen, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't sense any indication that she was actually there. And then there was a whisper, just a faint brush against his being.

"You weren't supposed to see it," the whisper told him, and then it was gone.

—

She had dozed off in the cockpit. It would be another three and a half hours yet before her ship would come out of hyperspace, so no real damage was done, but she hadn't intended to let her memories of her first stay on Tatooine reach Kylo Ren. It wouldn't change anything, she hoped—he would understand the memory was years old, and in case he decided to investigate the desert planet anyway, she was already lightyears away. Regardless of the fact that it was nothing serious, and he hadn't gotten past any of her shields, Aketaa was still upset. Ryla herself would always be a fond memory and a trusted friend; in fact, Aketaa had sought her out for advice and comfort as soon as she was able, and was relieved to find the Twi'lek still alive and well, running the same bar she had seven years ago. That didn't mean she wanted anyone to be that well-acquainted with her activities in Mos Eisley, especially not Kylo Ren.

How had it even happened? Was her mind so used to reaching for Kylo's that she did it in her sleep? That was certainly a frightening thought. Hopefully he wouldn't find a way to exploit the connection she could so easily make.

A thought occurred to her, and it made her lips twitch into a smile. At least he had felt the pain of what he'd done to her. Aketaa reached up to finger the rough, puckered end of her severed lek at her waist, sighing at the old injury, the permanent reminder of the night she thought she had lost Ben Solo forever. It was bitter and maybe a little cruel of her to gain satisfaction from knowing he suffered as she had, but it was only in passing. So long as she forgave him—and she had—a little anger was alright. She was grateful he only took the tip of her lek and not her life.

Aketaa tried to pass the time by meditating, but her concentration was still shaken. Not only did her memories of Mos Eisley cling to the forefront of her mind, her plan going forward worried her. With Ryla there providing her practical, no-nonsense opinion, Aketaa worked out a new Outer Rim planet, even more remote than Raydonia and even less populated by civilized peoples, to hide on until she was ready to let her mental shields down. Hopefully by then Aketaa would've been able to neutralize Kylo Ren's anger and hatred or at least open his mind to a less dangerous path. If she could face him in person, maybe she could talk him down from his hunger for power. In any case, she needed to be sure he would come alone before she let him find her.

The distance between Tatooine and this new planet was greater than what a single jump in hyperspace could span in her small ship. Aketaa would need to make three jumps, the first two as long as her ship could handle and the last a little less than half that. This was the second jump, and as it neared completion, so too Aketaa neared her new home for Force knew how long. The planet's name was lost to most modern maps, though apparently most ancient sources named it Echara, and Aketaa still wasn't sure how Ryla found it; she hadn't questioned her methods before, and she wasn't about to this time. All she knew was that it was supposed to be lush and beautiful, orbiting close around a weak star.

But what if Aketaa failed? What if Kylo Ren was too far gone to ever return to Ben Solo? What if he was irredeemable, too entrenched in the Dark side to ever leave it?

There lied the deeper problem: was there a Dark side to save him from? Was there a Light side and a Dark side, truly? Aketaa wasn't sure her earlier conclusion that the Force itself was neutral was correct. She had sensed herself many times a difference between Dark and Light. Perhaps the only mistake made by Jedi and Sith alike is seeing the two sides as black and white, two extremes, and one must choose an extreme to strive towards. She had heard of Gray Jedi before, and neutral Force-users; they were part of why she had thought the Force might be neutral in the first place. But wasn't it possible that some areas of the Force were Light, some Dark, and some firmly neither? Like life and death, both must exist in balance. Without death, there can be no room for new life, and without life, there can be no death. Just like shadows, the Dark needs the Light to exist, and without the Dark, the Light has no meaning. Aketaa only needed to show Kylo this truth, this balance, and hope that he would see the sense in it. If she could just show him that the question of Light or Dark is a false dilemma, maybe she could convince him to leave the path of the Dark side. Master Skywalker had said himself that bringing Kylo to the Light may be impossible.

An alert sounded, shaking Aketaa from her musings: this jump was nearly over. She checked the fuel reserves, and it looked like the ship would have just enough fuel to make it to her destination with a little extra. Hopefully the extra would be enough to get to a planet she could properly refuel at whenever she decided to leave. Aketaa came out of hyperspace and let the ship float for just a moment as she punched in her final coordinates and powered the hyperdrive up one last time.

—

"These visits of yours are happening more often. This is the third one in a week after three spaced out over more than half a year."

She had given up on appearing to him the way he remembered her. The woman that stood before him was her, there was no doubt about it: her facial markings hadn't changed, her skin was the same bright hue, and her eyes still held kind warmth in their golden depths. The difference was in the way she carried herself, the length and thickness of her headtails, the curve of her horns, and the seriousness with which she looked at him.

"After the last few, I assumed my game was up. I'll stop masquerading as a figment of your own subconsciousness if you agree to discuss something with me maturely."

"You want to talk about the Force? About how you sense Light in me? Do you think you can redeem me too?" he mocked.

"No," she said, with a small shake of her head.

"What, then? Are you here to join me? Rey rejected my offer of galactic power, but I know you're strong too."

"I won't join you, either. Haven't you paid attention?" she sighed.

"You showed me salvation and nostalgia. You can't turn back time, and the heroism of the Light side is all a farce, Aketaa. With my strength and your insight—"

"I'm not trying to lure you to the Light, you nerf herder. And I certainly won't join you, for the last time."

"Then why are you here?" he hissed. "I'm not even sure where 'here' is. We're just in the middle of nothingness," he said, indicating the void around them. "Why can't you pick an actual location to corner me in?"

"It takes a lot of energy to generate a setting," she snapped. "It's easy when you already dream of yourself in a place; you can't expect me to do everything."

"I at least expect you to reveal your intentions."

She sighed again and sat down, crossing her legs. There wasn't even anything to sit on, but he supposed if she were going to sit down, he might as well take advantage of standing much taller. He crossed the space between them as if he walking on solid ground that didn't exist to tower over her. She rolled her eyes at him. He crossed his arms and glowered.

"Why don't you tell me about this Rey person? You said she rejected you?"

"I don't have to tell you anything."

"Ah, so you're in love with her."

"I—no, I'm not. We just…we understood each other."

She nodded. "And so you thought she would want power like you."

He only scowled.

"Is she a Jedi?"

"Yes."

Out of all the reactions she could have displayed, chuckling was not one he had expected. "What a story of star-crossed lovers, indeed," she laughed. "You connected and felt each other's pain, and fell in love, but you each pledged yourselves to opposite, warring causes, is that it?"

"You're mocking me," he growled, anger bubbling in his chest.

She sobered quickly, composing herself again in her seated position. "I'm sorry," she said, "forgive me. Tell me, what circumstances let you grow to know her well enough to sympathize with her?"

How could he ever explain? Why should he explain? She had no right to know. "My master bridged a unique Force bond between us, and at random moments we could see each other as if the other was physically there," he said. So much for maintaining his privacy.

She frowned. "Interesting. When you offered her power, was this through one of those moments?"

"No, she had come to me in person, thinking she could seduce me to the Light. I brought her to my master, who revealed his whole plot. When he asked me to kill her, I killed him instead."

"And you fought together so well you thought she would want to fight by your side for the rest of your days."

"At the time, it seemed like a good idea." He found himself sitting on nothing at all, mimicking her position. "I see now it was folly. She never wanted me, only who she thought I could become if I joined her in the Light."

She hummed. "Love was so much simpler as a child," she whispered, not quite looking at him, but rather looking through him. "No expectations."

"You speak from experience." It was a statement, not an assumption. Her memories of that sandy hellscape were seared on the backs of his eyelids. He tried not to consider it; acknowledging the jealousy he felt would mean acknowledging his past, and he refused to do so.

She nodded. "I never told her I fell in love with her. I got over it after I left, and she'll still never know." She shrugged. "It's better that way. I couldn't stay there living the way I was, like she would've expected, and you can't be who you used to be, like Rey expected."

"Yes."

They sat in quiet commiseration; he didn't know how long. He studied his hands in his lap, considering his feelings for Rey. Did he love her? He loved her power, he was drawn to her strength of spirit, he could relate to her unfortunate past, and he wanted her body, but did he love Rey, the person, or did he love Rey, the idea?

It was some time before he looked up and realized he was alone, and she was no longer sitting quietly across from him.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: Hi, hello, what's goin on, how are you all? I'm good. Like, I mean, I'm struggling to work on my Marauders-era story child, and I just started my first retail job last week, and I have to move back to college in literally a week and a half, so my whole life is a ball of stress rn, but other than all of THAT, I'm good. Here, have this lovely angsty thing I've been working on on-and-off to try and get myself back in the flow of writing all summer (it didn't work but now i have an update for this story at least!). This is stretching out way farther than I thought it was going to tbh but I'm happy with where it's going so far, and I hope you're all happy with it too. I know it doesn't SEEM like Reylo, but I promise you, Aketaa and Kylo will NOT be reconnecting as anything other than friends. So don't worry about that. I like Reylo too much to wreck it in my own story.**

Echara was gorgeous. Everywhere she looked, at least where she landed, blue-green trees grew thick with needle-like leaves and tall trunks, the forest floor carpeted with blue grass and decaying needle leaves. Even in bare feet, the ground was soft, and it took no effort to move soundlessly. A crisp breeze moved the trees and froze the inside of her nose, smelling sharp and sweet. During her descent, Aketaa saw mountains nearby, and she hoped to find them while exploring the place. Small fuzzy creatures with eight webbed legs and long tails moved through the trees, jumping and gliding from branch to branch, tree to tree. They chittered to each other, unafraid of Aketaa and her ship. They must have few predators here, which was good news for her. Just as Ryla had promised, no signs of civilization were to be found anywhere, at least not without looking closer than she wanted to right then.

At the moment, her easiest living solution was to power her ship completely down with the entrance ramp down. She had established a sort of fire pit near the entrance within the first day on Echara, and she had enough food rations to figure out what here she could eat and what she couldn't. So far the fuzzy, leaping creatures were a no; they moved too fast for Aketaa to catch unless she found a different method, and they seemed like they had very little meat on their bones anyway. She hoped she would find some sort of ground-dwelling animal with more substance than the leapers. Interestingly, the only avian life she could hear sang at night, but she hadn't seen any of the birds yet—or at least she thought they were birds.

On her second night on Echara, Aketaa reached out to feel Kylo in meditation, and seized the opportunity. Now that she needed to stretch even farther to contact him, all of her energy went into simply sustaining her presence in his mind. She couldn't appear with an illusion of youth anymore, and she couldn't even consider creating some sort of space to house their meeting in, not if she wanted to stay as long as she did. Despite that, Aketaa found him surprisingly receptive to her. He never tried to force her out, and he was quite willing to discuss Rey, the student Master Skywalker mentioned. Perhaps she was already a common subject of his consideration, and so she was easy to talk about in his head.

While the encounter gave her hope that he would refrain from being overly aggressive to her, Aketaa held no expectation that reasoning with him would be simple. Additionally, she would have to avoid making him too curious about her own whereabouts; even though her shields were tight and his sensing her had failed before, if she kept initiating contact frequently he might be able to trace the direction of her probing. Having established that he could at least be spoken with like a person, Aketaa decided to dedicate important time to establishing herself on this planet, laying low in the Force for the time being.

Water was a priority. The morning after her conversation with Kylo Ren, Aketaa clipped her long-dormant lightsaber to her belt, threw on another layer against the chill of the breeze, and set out to find a lake or river or something. The land sloped downward to the west—she'd made note of the direction of the sunset in relation to her ship the past two nights—and instinct told her water would be downhill if anywhere. It wasn't long before she picked up the sound of moving fluid, and corrected her course to follow it. Before she reached what she assumed was a mountain spring, she reached a wide lake reflecting the sun up at her eyes through the trees.

It was beautiful, clear and calm. She brought the chemical safety testing equipment out of her pack, hoping it wasn't old enough to be unreliable. Crouching down at the lake's edge, Aketaa dipped the long probe into the water, keeping her eyes on the screen as readout graphs slowly loaded. The lake seemed to be made of mostly pure water. There were low concentrations of some common minerals, all at safe levels, and about the usual biotic life one would expect in a natural lake, but no toxins. She would need to treat the water to avoid ingesting parasites or harmful bacteria, but otherwise her first priority was fulfilled.

As Aketaa was packing up the testing equipment, she felt the tiniest little tap against her mental shields. It was next to nothing, but it was enough to worry her. Her protections were strong, and she knew she was still undetected, but someone was looking for her, someone who knew her well enough that they had reached out to where she would have been in their network many years ago. Kylo had started looking for her.

It felt good, for a moment, to know that she might be missed, but that moment passed in an instant. Whatever they had had as children was long gone; Kylo had seen to that when he cut her out of his life just as he cut off her lek, without a thought for what they had experienced together and without any regrets. Aketaa never expected for a minute that reconnecting with Kylo would lead to rekindling their old relationship, though she couldn't say she hadn't hoped once or twice that he would still find her desirable. Perhaps it was vanity more than a true yearning for lost love. No, she was glad to be beyond the prospects of romance with that man and all his jealousy, insecurity, and angry violence. Even when they were teenagers, the deeper he fell into the Dark, the worse he became in his demeanor to the point where she had begun to fear being alone with him. In some ways, it was a blessing that he had razed their lives to the ground.

She waited for weeks, counting the days with tick marks on the walls of her ship. After almost a month, she had only felt him reaching for her one more time, and she believed her shields were as strong as ever. Resisting the urge to hold her breath, she reached out.

—

He was treading water, or trying to tread water. The waves and rain came down on his head without mercy, and the thick fabric of his clothing was waterlogged and heavy, dragging him down. His fingers and toes were numb, and his limbs started to feel weak. His head sank below the water.

"Ben," he heard, as he tried to fight his way back up to air. "Ben, stop struggling."

Lungs burning, he looked around for her. She was standing on the sandy bottom, algae floating serenely around her legs, swaying in synchrony with her long headtails, one blunt-ended and shorter than the other. Looking into her eyes, he forgot the storm above the water.

Her gray lips pulled into a gentle smile. "Isn't it peaceful down here?" she asked. "Come, talk with me." She extended her arm, offering her hand.

He kicked his legs, reaching for her. The edges of his vision started to darken, his head beginning to fill with static. She bent her legs to push off the seabed—was it the sea? or a lake? he didn't know—and closed the distance between them, gripping his wrist and sinking with him slowly back down. When he felt his feet hit the bottom through his boots, she smiled again at him. A cloud of sand rose up through the algae, most settling again, some getting swept up and away by the current.

The waves on the surface scattered light in quick patterns across her face, illuminating the concerned tilt of her white brow markings. "Stop holding your breath," she commanded. "You'll make yourself pass out."

He shook his head, terrified of feeling the water fill his mouth, nose, and lungs, taking over his defenses because he was too weak to hold out against it.

"This is your dream," she reminded him. "You can breathe underwater if you want to." Kicking up small clouds of sand as she walked, she came closer to him, close enough to skate her hand from his wrist up to his shoulder. "Relax. You're so tense."

Before he realized she was moving again, he felt her hand on his scarred cheek, blessing him with the softest of caresses. In his shock at the sensation of her skin on his, he gasped, and it was over. His last breath bubbled out of his mouth as water rushed in, stinging his throat and settling heavy in his lungs. Panic washed over him, speeding his heart to a rapid rate pounding in his ears, but there was no pain as his body lost its precious air, and her thumb smoothed over his cheekbone, soothing him, prompting him to take a calming breath.

"Good," she said. "Well done." She waited as he breathed, his heart slowing, the adrenaline ebbing. Then she shifted her hands down to his upper arms and said, "Let's talk."

They settled on the sand, sitting across from each other, like they had the last time she appeared. This time, he didn't bother asking her to join him; he had already exhausted that argument, and he knew he would never win her over to the Dark side. This time, he wanted to get a straight answer out of her, without letting her beat around the bush. This time, he asked, "Why are you reaching out to me?"

"Have you had any more Force connections with Rey?"

He had, actually. There was that time when she escaped the salt planet with her precious shambles of a Resistance, when she slammed the button to close the entrance ramp of the Falcom as if she were slamming a door in his face. Then there was the time when she had clearly been in the middle of something important, strategic discussions, he assumed, and she had pretended she couldn't see or hear him. One time he had been in the middle of a meal, and he embarrassingly spilled soup all over himself.

"Yes, on multiple occasions," he answered. The downside of meeting Aketaa in his mind was that he could not seem to lie to her.

"You've wondered, I assume, why these connections still occur after Snoke's death?"

"Of course I have," he snapped.

She nodded, headtails drifting around her shoulders. "You're being defensive. You're connecting the dots."

"And you're avoiding my original question." He stood, impatience reaching critical levels. "Why are you here?"

For a beat, she just looked up at him, yellow eyes flashing irregularly as they reflected the surface light filtering in through the waves. "I never finished my Jedi training; you saw to that. For seven, almost eight years, I've lived my life apart from what teachings I had learned, hiding that part of me so completely that no one would ever suspect it was there. It gave me perspective, like Snoke gave you perspective, but instead of switching sides I don't think I'll ever take a side again. This isn't about the Resistance, and this isn't about the First Order, Ben; this is about the Force, and I don't think it was ever right to take one side to begin with.

"I tried to make you think about the pain the Dark side inflicts on you and everyone around you. I tried to show you the innocence we once had, before we were concerned with Light or Dark. I'm trying to make you think about Rey. She has the knowledge of a youngling when it comes to the Force, and she has no one to indoctrinate her in either dogma, only the politics of the Resistance. What will she become without the old Jedi teachings? What am I becoming? What is the Force? That's what this is about," she finished.

His hands had clenched into fists as she said these things, and now he grit his teeth, scowling down at her. He had suspected she had been trying to manipulate him since the beginning, and he was right, though he wasn't entirely sure what to make of her ideas. She didn't say explicitly that she wanted to turn him from the Dark side, but she heavily implied it, that was certain; what was she trying to convert him to, though? He didn't know. In the absence of a better response, he gave her angry words.

"Snake," he accused through clenched teeth. "I have been honest with you, and you refuse to give me a straight answer. You told me nothing!"

"The tides are turning," she said, a stern force behind her tone. She stood to match his posture, though her eye level was no higher than his chin. "I'm telling you that you need to think. Think about your adolescence and your conflict and your Darkness and your Lightness and the universe itself. The world isn't black and white like they told us it is, and it's time you start understanding that."

With that, her form dissolved, swirling into nothingness in the water. She took all sense of safety with her, and he was drowning once again.

—

After two and a half months, the relief in solitude was beginning to wear off. Aketaa hadn't found any native people with sentience, only a myriad of animals. She had at least figured out that there were plump little ground-dwelling creatures about the length of her forearm with eight little feet and a stubby little tail that could be easily hunted, skinned, and cooked. The meat was sweet and tender, juicy with fat, and one of these animals made a perfect stew that could last her two or three days when she added to it the starchy tubers she discovered by observing the very same animals. Other than the ground-dwellers and the tree-swingers, she had noted a handful of different insects, none of which troubled her, and a much smaller eight-legged critter that was no bigger than her fist and lived in little burrows among the tree roots. Nowhere could Aketaa find any sign that a sentient, civilized population had ever existed on Echara.

She developed a habit of talking to herself and the things around her by the end of her third month. There was no other way to maintain her sanity, isolated as she was. Now and then she'd make casual conversation with the burrowers when they came to poke their curious snouts around her campsite, or she'd ask the trees rhetorical questions. She started thanking the lake when she visited to collect water, and sincerely apologizing to the ground-dwellers she hunted.

"I know if I talked to Kylo often, then I probably wouldn't be talking to you right now," she told the little ball of fluff that was currently climbing up the side of a crate she had brought out of the ship. "It's just risky to contact him so many times. If he grows too familiar with the feeling of my visits, no matter how well I hide my signature, he might be able to feel out the direction I'm coming from. I can't let that happen, obviously. There's no guarantee he won't track me down and kill me just to be rid of me." She sighed and rubber a hand over the juncture between her montrals. "You don't care, of course. Stars, you don't even understand a thing I'm saying."

To help herself and keep her mind sharp, Aketaa decided she would write out all her musings on the Force and its nature. Perhaps it would break the habit of speaking to things that could never speak back in addition to ordering her nebulous thoughts. There was a mobile solar generator unit tucked away in a storage compartment of her ship, so Aketaa brought it outside and charged up a datapad where she could type up document after document. This endeavor of hers took up plenty of time, and it felt as if she was being depressurized as she translated her thoughts into concrete words.

The singing still happened every night, and Aketaa still couldn't tell what it was. Being a Togruta, her eyes were well-suited for seeing in the dark, but there were no birds she could find in the trees whenever she tried to look. Anyway, the singing sounded far-away, so maybe she couldn't find its origins because they simply weren't there around her. At least, that's how it was for a long while, until one evening just days after Aketaa began to notice a seasonal change taking place around her. She woke up to frost two mornings in a row, and the foliage had begun to look a few shades darker blue than the aqua color she had grown used to.

That evening, just after a beautiful purple sunset, the singing started up as it always did, melodious and smooth and distant, until suddenly it became shrill and sharp for a few moments before it stopped altogether. When it started again hours later, the sound seemed to come from a different direction. Aketaa hadn't even realized the sound had a direction until she knew the source must have moved to a new place. Something had attacked the singers, Aketaa thought, and made them move to a new singing ground. This was the first evidence she had of a predator-prey dynamic on the peaceful planet. She hoped that whatever hunted the singers was too small or too afraid to hunt her, too. After listening to the singers for a while longer, Aketaa went into her ship to go to sleep for the night.

In the morning, she rose and came out of the ship, bare feet banging down the metal ramp for a few steps before a sound made her freeze. A whimpering? Yes, something was hiding under her ship, and she had frightened it. Aketaa proceeded with more caution, using a light step to walk down the rest of the ramp and making slow movements to come around the side of it. She crouched and ducked her head to have a look. Curled up under the ramp, in the most protected place it could find, was a very leggy, long-necked little animal. In the shadow of the ship and in the weak morning light, Aketaa thought it looked very similar in color to the blue Echaran grass. She used a gentle Force suggestion to calm the animal and reached out for it, being careful not to bang her montrals against the edge of the metal ramp. With some coaxing, she brought the creature out into the light. It protested with a clear, melodic sound, and Aketaa realized this was one of the singing animals.

It was nocturnal. She could feel its weariness and see the reflective backing in its silvery eyes. She picked it up, cradled it in her arms, and carried it into her ship to give it a safe and warm place to rest. Not for the first time, Aketaa cursed her remote isolation; she had no idea if this animal was a youngling or an adult, how to tell if it was male or female or neither, or what the dietary and behavioral needs of its species were. As she went back outside, having settled the creature in a nest of blankets and spare clothes, she tried to develop a guess as to how it ended up in her camp. Maybe the singers were pack creatures, and this one was separated from the pack during what Aketaa was pretty sure was an attack last night. It ran in one direction, and its pack ran in another. Maybe the entire pack scattered. Should she be using the word "pack"? This animal didn't seem like a predator—its eyes were positioned on the sides of its head, a common feature of prey animals across many planets, especially when Aketaa compared it to the tree-swingers, whose eyes were front-facing, and the ground-dwellers and burrowers, whose eyes were side-facing. Wasn't "pack" a predator term? Togruta were pack creatures, though the polite term was "a tribal people." Togruta were also without a doubt predators. Perhaps "herd" was a better fit.

She roused the ashes and coals back to smoldering so she could reheat yesterday's stew. A chill blew through the forest, rustling the soft needle-leaved trees. As soon as the pot felt hot, Aketaa brough her breakfast back inside the ship, where it was warmer. Finding the little singer asleep, she settled down next to it with a spoon.

"You and me, huh?" she said quietly so as not to disturb the creature. "Two animals separated from our packs. Or herds. Let's just call them our families." Aketaa chewed a soft piece of meat for a moment, then said, "Of course, your family's at least on this planet, in this forest. They can't be too far off if you made it here in one night. My family, they're scattered throughout the galaxy like shards of a broken plate."

Alright, so maybe she was taking advantage of a captive audience, but it was nice to have something there to talk to that didn't scurry away after five minutes and wasn't a tree. She was feeling sentimental on account of this lost little creature, so Aketaa told it all about her life. Her mother had told her all about her grandmother, who wasn't really her grandmother, and she tried to remember how all the stories went. Then she talked about Shili the way she remembered it, through child's eyes, and about moving away from it to learn from Luke Skywalker, for all the good that did her. She must have spoke too loudly, because the animal raised its pointed head, blinked up at her, and lowered it again, this time extending its long neck to press the tip of its dark purple nose against her thigh. Aketaa's heart practically melted, and if she wasn't sure about the singer before, she now knew that she would die for it without question.

Continuing in a much softer voice, she went on: "You know, Kylo Ren was my first friend at Master Skywalker's academy. He was Ben Solo back then, just a boy as sad as I was to be away from home. I'm only a couple years younger than him, or maybe it's three years? I think it's two years. Anyway, I arrived when I was six, and Ben had been there a year already. I don't know why I gravitated to him instead of one of the other students—there were a handful there around our age. Maybe it's because I could tell he was lonely, more so than anyone else." She found a bone in the stew and picked it up to suck at the marrow. "Master Skywalker tried to enforce that whole Jedi-can't-have-strong-attachments rule, but I'm pretty sure Ben and I were, as the kids say, dating by the time I turned fifteen. That's not a great word for it, though, because we didn't go on dates, not really. We just spent almost all our time together, and..." She trailed off and gnawed absently on the bone. "Anyway," she said, "it was a long time ago, and it didn't go well. Maybe it would have gone better if that voice hadn't been in his head, dragging out his Darkness. I could feel it there with him. By the end, I never knew when it would suddenly take over him. And then, you know, he and Master Skywalker started fighting one night, and next thing you know, he's calling himself Kylo Ren and burning the academy and temple, asking the other students to join him in the Dark side or die." She snorted, but quietly, for the singer. "That was a mess. That's how I ended up with one short lek," Aketaa told it, balancing her stew in her lap to hold up the scarred end of her right front lek.

For a moment, she fingered the puckered scar, remembering back to that night. He had burst into her room, kicking the door open with more force than was necessary. Aketaa had already been awake, feeling the pain of the deaths in the Force and watching the flames grow and spread from her window. She should have run earlier. He tried to appeal to her first, asked her to join him, but she could feel that Dark presence so strongly that she was too afraid to speak—Snoke, she realized years later, right there in his head, poisoning his mind. Then he demanded, then he threatened, and then he ignited his lightsaber with a growl of frustration and anger. That's when she finally reacted, and her jade green blade met his emerald one in a clash of bright light. He was stronger in this fight than he was when they sparred for practice, and it was all she could do to worm her way around him and dash out the door and towards the hangar. He followed her, tried to hold her with the Force, but he was more of a mess inside than the academy was outside, so he couldn't pin her down for more than a minute. A second battle, and her guard slipped, and in a blink of an eye the end of her lek was hitting the floor with a fleshy slap, leaving a sizzling stump behind. She knows she screamed, because she felt it buzzing in her montrals so loudly that it made them ache, and the pain must have fueled her last desperate attempt to get away. She gave one mighty Force push, and Kylo Ren was thrown back into the hangar wall, hard. It bought her enough time to escape in the ship.

Aketaa sighed and finished her breakfast stew. The past was the past. What was important now was that she didn't get herself killed while trying to talk Kylo Ren out of tyrannical power through the Dark side. Rey seemed to be a workable angle. The more she thought about it over the past months, the better she liked the idea of appealing to Kylo through discussions of Rey. Their Force connection was very interesting, especially because the bond persisted after Snoke, the perceived cause, was dead. Balance, Master Skywalker had stressed to her. Find balance, seek balance, restore balance. Was this the Force manifesting its own balance in joining Kylo Ren to Rey? Aketaa wished she could meet Rey; perhaps if she did, she could confirm or discard this idea. But no, Rey was lightyears across the galaxy from Echara—just like everything else.

—

He became aware of her presence as if she had just stepped into the room where he sat meditating.

"It's been a while," he said, seeing her wrapped in a heavy cloak in his mind's eye. "It must be cold where you're hiding."

She nodded, to his surprise. "Colder than I'd like, yes. There's no climate quite as perfect as those warm Shili grasslands." Casually, she looked around and adjusted the fabric of the cloak, pulling it tighter around her. "You keep your spaces nice and chilled, too, I see. Thank you," she added, "for supplying a setting this time."

He didn't even realize he was producing a mimicry of his quarters for this mental meeting until she pointed this out, and he rushed to clear the place of anything too personal—not that he had many personal affects to begin with. As if she was idly curious, she stepped further into the colorless room to drag her vibrant fingertips across the glass tabletop, then the back of his desk chair. With a sigh, she came to a stop only a few steps from where he was seated on the thin rug, looking out the floor-to-ceiling viewport at the stars. He looked up at her as she admired the view. The cloak, a warm tan color, made of a rough-knit fabric, obstructed the shape of her body and length of her headtails, but he could still appreciate her strong nose and prominent cheekbones.

"There's nothing quite like the view of stars from among the stars to make you feel totally insignificant, is there?" she asked softly.

He didn't answer. After a moment, she stepped around him, brushing his knees with the cloak, and walked over to his bed. She sat on the mattress and made a face, wrinkling up her nose and furrowing her white brow markings. Settling cross-legged in a mound of heavy fabric at the foot of his large bed, she looked very small. Even the horns, which he noticed had grown into a more pronounced and graceful curve since he had last seen her in person, only added to the dwarfing effect. It was all an illusion, of course, and maybe she was even projecting herself like that on purpose to look non-threatening or something.

"Such a hard mattress," she said. "How do you sleep on this thing without feeling sore?"

"It's supportive," he snapped. "Anything softer and my back hurts."

She winced in a dramatic way. "Are you getting old, Ben? You're, what, 30 now, aren't you?"

He rolled his eyes and turned back to face the viewport. "Are you here to talk about your philosophy again?"

"I'd like to talk about Rey, actually. I wish I could meet her myself, but for now I have to settle for knowing her through you."

"That's a ridiculous notion," he scoffed. "I'm anything but an unbiased source of information."

"Well, yes, I know, but I like to think your perception of her adds flavor to the whole situation. It'll be interesting to see in which direction your bias leans." She paused, and then asked, "Does it bother you when I call you 'Ben'? It felt right when I appeared as my younger self, but..." She trailed off.

Actually, no one had asked him that question before. People either knew him as Kylo Ren, the Supreme Leader and dread Knight of the Order of Ren, or they wanted him to be Ben Solo again. He had chosen the name 'Kylo' all those years ago, but in truth both names caused him pain. Of course he was bothered by being Ben: all that meant was another person desperate for things to go back to the way they were, unable to see that he could never go back now even if he wanted to. And yet, maybe it would sting even more to hear the name 'Kylo' in her mouth. But wasn't that what he deserved after everything? Aketaa, whom he had betrayed more than any of them, precisely because she had never betrayed him, now returned to him the pain he had caused her, as was her right.

He realized he had been sitting silent for too long. "I'm not Ben Solo anymore," he told her, "and I won't ever be Ben Solo again. I would ask that you respect my new name and title, but—" he shrugged, "—I know you'll do as you please."

"Alright. You chose to be Kylo Ren, after all; as I don't wish to make an enemy of you, it's only right I respect the name you chose. Just don't expect me to hail you as anything but a very large man-child." He heard her shifting on the bed behind him. "So, Ky—can I use a diminutive?—tell me about what Rey is like in person."

Ky was a plucky teenager who could take trick shots with a blaster, not an adult ruler of the galaxy, but he found he didn't hate it. He let it slide and answered her request. "She's...intense." Yes, that was the best word to describe her. "Nothing she does is done half-hearted, like she concentrates all of her willpower into each moment she lives. And the raw Force is strong in her; before she understood what it was, she was fighting against me and winning."

"That's quite the admission," she said.

"There's no point in lying, not to you," he replied. "There's nothing you can do to me but talk."

She hummed, a noncommittal noise. "If there's no point in lying, then what do you think of her, truly? You told me you felt you understood each other, and obviously you think highly enough of her to offer her a place of power with you. How did you understand each other? What is it about her that appealed to you?"

It ached to think about it all: those first moments of connection, exposing their vulnerabilities to each other, growing comfortable just talking, until that outpouring of acceptance from her as she told him he wasn't alone and reached out her hand to him; the strange and unexpected joy he felt when he sensed that she was coming to him, his anticipation so great that he even combed his hair; that glorious and triumphant battle, during which they had trusted each other so effortlessly and completely, culminating in his clumsy and tactless offer and their terrible struggle that rent Skywalker's lightsaber in two. To top it all off, he had watched her shut the door, cutting him off from her deep well of empathy. He clenched his jaw for a moment and took in a deep breath.

"She was a mystery, at first, this scavenger rat who was more powerful than I expected. It must have been the first time in her life she had encountered the Force, and she was pushing against my probe and reaching into my head during what should have been my interrogation of her. Then of course she escaped, I'm sure with the help of the new power she discovered. We fought, and it was like the Force was fighting through her; it must have been, because this was her first time in a lightsaber duel and she bested me. Not long after, the Force bond connected us."

"And that was when you felt something for her, after the bond gave you time with her?"

"Neither of us knew what was going on, at first, but she used the opportunity to lash out at me. That's very like her, by the way. It's her impulse to feel very strongly one way or the other and make up her mind very resolutely. She doesn't stop and think until she must."

"Hm. Then conflict does not sit well with her?"

"No, I don't think it does. She told me I was a monster, and I agreed with her. That seemed to stun her, to have her own assumptions about my villainy confronted like that. I don't think it took very long for her to convince herself I could be persuaded to the Light after that."

There was a rustling of fabric, and then Aketaa appeared at his side, sitting down a respectful distance away and stretching her legs out in front of her. Her red-orange feet with their white-striped toes were bare. "But what happened next? Something must have happened that appealed to your heart. You still have a heart, I know."

He knew exactly what did it. It was a mistake, a moment of weakness—it was foolish. "She trusted me," he sighed, looking out at the infinite dazzle of stars, each distant and as coldly beautiful as crystals of ice, snowflakes caught on his black gloves and frost forming on his black cloak. "She confided in me because I wasn't a monster anymore. And she was so lost and so sad after her encounter with the Dark side—not important now," he said quickly, waving away Aketaa's sudden curiosity. "I tried to offer her some comfort, tell her she wasn't alone, and she immediately turned it around to share it with me."

For an immeasurable amount of time, perhaps seconds or hours, they were silent, sitting on the floor next to each other. And then: "Oh, sweet man," she whispered, "I wish I had loved you more."

She turned and leaned over to kiss his cheek, and then, like mist evaporating in the sunlight, she was gone.

—

Aketaa killed with her teeth. That's what they were designed to do, after all, and becoming a primal hunter for a short while suited her just fine. The ground-dwellers were active enough at dusk, and she was still able to find an abundance of them in the forest. She made quick work of one to roast and feast on that night, then decided to catch a second to make a stew for the coming days. There had been no lunch for her that day, not after sitting so long next to the singer, hesitant to disturb it in any way, so she was hungry enough to devour a whole ground-dweller in minutes. While she was there, she searched for patches of the plants that would yield her their bulbous and starchy roots. There was an herb, too, that reminded her of sweet mint, and another that had a pungent bite raw but boiled down to a delicious smoky flavor. These she gathered to flavor the stew.

During the hours upon hours she spent at the little creature's side, Aketaa had meditated. She grounded herself to peaceful Echara, feeling the wind whistling through the blue grasses and darkening needle trees. Around her campsite, the Echaran wildlife went about their busy lives. She thought she could even feel the faint breath of the singer herd as they slept, far away and safe. Nothing stuck out to her as an identifiable predator, but she didn't linger on that for long. The victims of time decomposed in the dirt, things reaching the ends of their lives, leaf litter and small bodies broken down by fungi and insects she had not yet seen for herself, becoming food for the new growth of the planet. Death linked cosmically to life, as it always has been and always will be. Dark and Light, eternal.

Then, when she rose from the details of her immediate surroundings and observed the web of all interconnected sentient life, she picked up Kylo Ren's meditative energy without even needing to think about it. Hadn't she just been telling the singer that she couldn't let her visits to him become frequent again? Yes, but in her deepest needs, she was lonely, and he was the only one she could talk to who could give her that satisfaction of companionship. It wasn't so difficult to hide out on Raydonia, where she was surrounded by her friends and students, and even on Tatooine she had spent her time surrounded by an almost crushing population and been honored with the attention of Ryla. On Echara, she was withering, just a bit, and she wanted so badly to have a conversation.

She debated with herself for a short while before finally reaching out to cling to his consciousness for a little while. It felt a little desperate to her, but hopefully it had been long enough since the last visit that Kylo wouldn't pick up on her incredible isolation. It seemed to her that he didn't. He was more composed than usual, and he was more open than usual. It was a nice little change of pace, she thought, to not be shouted at or witnessing his suffering. His calm demeanor reminded her of the Ben Solo she used to know, as a matter of fact, though she could never admit such a thing to him. Oh, he used to be calm, alright. There was a time when he didn't have the violent temper Kylo Ren was so famous for, and he was instead just a thoughtful and reserved boy, perhaps more prone to frustration than others, but so driven to figure it all out in the end, focusing with a quiet determination until he understood and succeeded. He was still that same person in there, somewhere hidden under the layers of damage done to him by his upbringing and Snoke's particular influence.

Initially, Aketaa wanted to add his years steeped in the Dark side to his horrible influences, but she hesitated. What was the Dark side, really? She'd been over this before. It was half of the universe, it was death and decay, it was violence and anger, grief and passion. It was in everyone in some measure, some more than others, that was certain. It was as natural as the Light side. Aketaa was sure Kylo Ren was Dark, but that was perhaps not such a bad thing in and of itself. And anyway, there was Light in him to temper the rash impulses of the Darkness; he had just been suppressing it over the last decade. So, no, he was not damaged by the Dark side of the Force. The only damage done by Darkness was done by individuals enforcing a dogma of complete Darkness.

The Dark side was present in Rey, too, she would wager. From what Kylo told her, she was no paragon of saint-like Light. She believed him when he said she was passionate and unrestrained. Surely Kylo knew there was some measure of Darkness in her that he had wanted to draw out of her, just as Rey must have thought she could draw out the Light in him. Without doubt, she was his equal and opposite match. Maybe she was so powerful without training because she was free of any extremist ideology and was instead fully herself, and maybe Kylo was limited even with all his training because it was exactly his Dark side training that taught him to suppress those parts of him that would make him strong.

When she returned to her camp, the sun had sunk down behind the trees. The little singer was emerging from the ship.

"Hello, little one," Aketaa said, speaking softly to avoid startling it. It offered her a little trill as it stepped into the grass at the foot of the ramp. "So, what do you eat? You must be hungry."

As she built up her fire, Aketaa observed the creature as it walked around, methodically inspecting everything in her little campsite of a clearing. It nosed at her as she sat to skin the first ground-dweller before wandering away again, making Aketaa smile for a moment before returning her attention to the dead animal in her lap. She sliced here and cut there before skillfully ripping the main body of the hide from the meat. Another glance up to the singer, and she found it was grazing peacefully only a yard or two from where she sat.

"You're a forager species, then?" She sat and watched the creature step with its eight thin legs, long neck reaching to nibble the stalks of blue grass. "I wonder if you're an herbivore or an omnivore."

Once the ground-dweller was impaled on the spit and set to roast over the flames, Aketaa relaxed and licked at her bloody hunting knife, wet from the skinning. She'd skin the second one later when she was ready to boil a stew. For now, it was sitting to the side with her gathered herbs and tubers. It would be a late night, but that was fine. Her eyes were designed for seeing easily in the dark. Anyway, her new friend was nocturnal, so she might as well spend some time observing its habits.

So passed the evening, and many after it. She was growing comfortable on Echara, even though the winter was setting in. The frost began to last longer and longer in the mornings, and then one night Aketaa could see it begin to form over the landscape. The singer didn't seem to mind it, but Aketaa did. It was cold inside her ship, though it was out of the wind, and she decided to build a small fire inside where it could keep her warm while she slept.

—

He felt it: just a hint, an indication, like the faintest curl of smoke from a stick of incense. It was Aketaa. Whatever shields she had been using to block him out had been strong, very strong, but now they started to weaken. It was her own fault. She wasn't disciplined enough to sustain her excursions into his mind while guarding her presence. Before it slipped away, he grabbed it, pulling it and twisting it around until it was a solid thread, real and concrete in his mind. This, finally, was her connection to the Force, made accessible and traceable to him. He decided to reach out along the line and follow it to its source. It wouldn't tell him her physical location, but maybe he could get a read on her.

It occurred to him that he didn't know what he expected or what he wanted out of finding her Force signature, other than confirming once and for all that she was truly real and not just some trick sent to invade his psyche. By whom, he had no idea, but it was always a possibility. As Supreme Leader, there was now a larger target on his head that he must acknowledge.

But no, she was there, yes, just the slightest pulse from very far away. He concentrated his energy on it until he had amplified it for himself, tuning his senses to its existence. He had to make sure he could find her in the Force again. Rey was lost to him; though they still saw each other through the bond, she knew how to shut him out very effectively. If he could feel Aketaa's signature, he could perhaps use it as a comfort the way he had grown to use Rey's signature. At least one person in the whole kriffing galaxy cared about him, and that was all he needed to reassure himself of now and then.

He wondered…the flicker of her life was weak to him, but maybe it would be enough. He shifted, took a deep breath, and focused. Grab the thread that lead to her consciousness, follow it, grip her signature—was there a way in? He envisioned the walls keeping the world out and saw were they were starting to fall apart. Tap, pick, scratch, break them open.

—

It was time to brave the cold to take a bath. She'd been avoiding it because of the cold, but she could smell the smoke of burning wood and meat on her skin, mixed with the sweat from wearing so many layers. In honesty, she felt grimy and gross, and so a wash was necessary. She gathered soap and towels and started the walk to the lake. The singer—whose name, she'd decided, was Krishden, after one of her muscially-inclined Raydonian students—walked along with her, moving much more deftly over the terrain with its many legs than Aketaa did with her two legs.

At the lake, Krishden happily stopped to drink, pleased with such an adventure so early in its evening. Aketaa dipped her foot in the crystal-clear water. Cold. Very cold. Very, very cold. She cursed the fact that she didn't have a tub big enough to fill with heated water for a proper bath. With an annoyed huff, she undressed, dropping her clothes on the shore. The air was already so cold. She waded into the lake, and stars, it was freezing. Before she started really shivering, Aketaa used the Force to retrieve the soap from the shore. Her lekku and toes were beginning to tingle, but she lathered the soap over her arms anyway.

And then, a mental pulse, so strong it made her vision go white for a split second. It was followed by searing pain jolting through her skull. She dropped the soap into the water and cried out, hands pressing against her head. The pulse, the lightning bold of pain, a second time, a third, a fourth. Her feet slipped on the lakebed, and though she was only standing in water as deep as her waist, she went under. Her mouth filled with icy lake water as she screamed. She wasn't submerged long. She surfaced and coughed, gagging on the water she had choked down, and still the pain continued. It felt like her brain was shattering.

Clumsily, she stumbled out of the lake, splashing her way onto the shore, and she collapsed on the smooth stones. Curling into a ball now, kicking her legs out the next second, writhing and thrashing, she cried. She gasped as something like a hot poker impaled her spine, ramming from the base of her skull down to her tailbone. Then, it all stopped, leaving her aching and panting.

Someone there. A presence in the Force. Speaking in her head.

"I did not intend to cause so much pain," it said.

"Well," she wheezed aloud, "you did."

Gone now. Alone. Kriff. Stars. Kriffing stars. Aketaa raised herself up on shaking arms and legs, snatching up the towels to wrap around her freezing body. Krishden was gone. She probably scared her little friend away with her screaming. She was now isolated all over again. Who the hell was that?

—

Well. That had not gone as well as he had hoped. He had never maintained mental shields in the Force like that for so many years, and he hadn't known that they would be so painful to dismantle. Breaking the guard of someone else always causes some mental pain, but he truly hadn't known it would be so immense for her. He had gotten flashes as it happened: a lake, trees, a pebbled shore. He heard her cries of pain ringing in his ears. She would never trust him again, in all likelihood, but then, had she trusted him in the first place? She hid from him and disguised herself as a memory, and she wouldn't give him any direct answers to his questions. Maybe she deserved to feel the pain as retribution for shutting him out. Still, he couldn't help but let her know it wasn't supposed to hurt that much.

Now her signature was strong, a brightly shining life open for him to see without her crumbling shields in the way. He prodded at it, trying to take its measure without letting her know. There was the Light, burning bright at her core, but here and there were mottled shadows of Darkness, flowing and mingling with the rays of the Light side freely. It was odd. He could feel the proportions fluctuate just in the short moments he sat there watching it. Was she conflicted and struggling? She hadn't seemed so when she visited him. Even now, he sensed no distress other than the pain he had put her through, though he wasn't sure how accurate he could be with these things given the ridiculous distance she had surely put between them.

If she could span it undetected, then so could he. He had the advantage of eight more years of training than she had, so getting into her mind should be a piece of cake. What would happen, he wondered, if he invaded while she was still awake and aware? All her visits took place while he was asleep or at least meditating. Would he see through her eyes, like the memory she sent by accident? He was curious, and he wanted more from her than he had already glimpsed today, so he put up a shield and dove into her mind.

It was more difficult than he had anticipated to worm his way into her head. She wasn't passive as she might have been while dreaming or meditating; she was active and alert. He tried to find that same orientation from the memory, trying to mimic the feeling of being in the middle of it as a silent observer. It sort of worked, he supposed. He heard her breathing, heavy and rasping, and distant nighttime calls of far-off things, again eerily loud and reverberant: the sound she received with her horns, fed through his ears. Her eyes were closed, and it was dark beyond the lids. He felt himself break out in goosebumps as the shocking cold she felt washed over him, and a pounding ache grew in his head. In a few blinks, the eyes were open, and he saw a strangely illuminated nighttime forest, lit beyond the power of her blazing fire. This was natural night vision: it was as if he were seeing through goggles, yet the image was color-corrected, not green-toned, and perfectly clear. It was incredible—and to think, many species saw like this all the time and took it for granted.

Barely a minute, but he had seen all he wanted to see. He left, leaving her sensory experiences behind. None of the flora he saw was at all recognizable, and he didn't even know if her night vision portrayed the true colors of her surroundings, which could confound any attempts as identification. At least he could rule out the more popular locations.

Finding her...why did he want to find her? Was there a reason to see her in the flesh, or was it reflex to track down the people in his past to finish them off? With no one to order her dead, he didn't think he would kill her if he found her. He found he didn't want her to die, though the feeling was nowhere near as strong as his utter desperation to stop Rey's torture at the hands of Snoke. He wouldn't kill for her like he would kill for Rey, because even after all that had broken between him and the scavenger girl, he knew he would do it all over again without hesitation. But as irksome as Aketaa sometimes was to him, he wouldn't kill her.

He had tried to, once. It was a different time, when he was young, angry, hurt, and desperate to prove he wasn't too weak to do it. "Kill them, all of them," Snoke had whispered to him that night. Following Skywalker's betrayal, he had been unstable enough to actually go on that rampage, setting fire to the campus of buildings at the academy and the temple itself, slaughtering those who tried to stop him. Three of his fellow students converted and followed him that night, and together they joined the Knights of Ren. Sparing their three lives had made him all the more determined to kill Aketaa when she refused to be spared too, and he had felt triple the rage when she got away. Weakness. And, really, it had been a mistake to amputate a piece of her headtail; she had channeled the pain, and that was how she finally escaped him: a Dark side instinct, actually, to use something like pain as a means of power and strength.

That was something he had realized when he was taught to do the same thing by Snoke months after his conversion. He had laughed at the irony of it then, that Jedi apprentice Aketaa had Dark side instincts and probably didn't even know it. Now, though, he thought about it more carefully, turning the idea around in his mind. It reminded him of Rey and the way her actions and words could be driven by fear, anger, and spite in a way the Jedi would have discouraged. Aketaa's words came back to him. "The world isn't black and white like they told us it is, and it's time you start understanding that," she had said.

The buzz of the comm interrupted his thoughts and broke his meditation. He growled as the blue hologram of Hux materialized on his desk. "What?" he barked.


End file.
